Prof. Shyam Sundar
Padma Shri, 2026 — Medicine (Infectious Diseases / Kala-azar)
The Muzaffarpur boy who gave a neglected fever a strip test, an oral pill, and a single drip — and watched the case count fall from tens of thousands to a few hundred.

Born 30 November 1953, Muzaffarpur. District school. Banaras Hindu University for everything that followed: MBBS 1977, MD Medicine 1981, lecturer the same year. Four decades at the Institute of Medical Sciences. Distinguished Professor after retirement in 2020. In 1993 he opened the Kala-azar Medical Research Centre in Muzaffarpur — free diagnosis, treatment, food, the fare home — a field unit that became a model the programmes copied. More than five hundred papers. Four in the New England Journal of Medicine, the only Indian with that count in the field. Fellow of all three national science academies. Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London. Distinguished International Fellow and Clara Southmayd Ludlow Medal of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. President’s Visitor Award, 2016. President, Association of Physicians of India, 2022. Ranked first in the world for leishmaniasis research for years on end.

Kala-azar — visceral leishmaniasis — lived in the poorest belts of Bihar, eastern UP, Nepal, Bangladesh. Long, toxic injections. Diagnosis that needed a needle in the spleen. He put the rK39 rapid strip into the village: a drop of blood, fifteen minutes. He led the trials that made miltefosine the first effective oral drug. He showed that a single dose of liposomal amphotericin B could replace a month of treatment — NEJM, 2010 — safer, shorter, fit for a national programme. Combination regimens followed, usable at a primary health centre. WHO adopted the protocols. India, Nepal and Bangladesh used them to hit elimination targets. Cases in India: 44,533 in 2007; 834 in 2022. He was first to document large-scale drug resistance in Leishmania donovani and to isolate the strains. He still says the hard work is keeping the number down: PKDL on the skin, HIV co-infection, the reservoir that does not announce itself.

“I am extremely happy to receive Padma Shri.” And, to a reporter in his own language: I did this work for my country.

A student once asked why a Banaras professor kept a clinic in Muzaffarpur.

“Because the fever was never in the lecture hall,” he is said to have answered. “It was in the house that could not afford a month of injections. Give them a strip and a single day. Then the programme can walk.”